Leap finally gets LTE, rollout starts next week

Leap customers, go ahead and jump for joy. The CDMA-based carrier is finally rolling out its first LTE market next week after about a year of testing it in Tucson, Arizona. (The first official market has yet to be named, however.) With its spectrum swaps finally complete, Leap hopes to spread LTE to around 21 million POPs by the end of this year and to around two-thirds of its current network by the end of 2015. Its only LTE offering is a Huawei Boltz mobile hotspot, but it promises LTE-capable smartphones soon. Curiously, the carrier does offer the LTE-capable iPhone 5, but there's no word if Leap's LTE network will support it. The only nationwide carrier without LTE at this point is T-Mobile, though it has promised rollouts starting next year; here's hoping that merger with MetroPCS (which already has LTE) will hurry that along.